Boss Snikrot

Boss Snikrot is an Ork Kommando boss who leads the Red Skull Kommandos through the equatorial jungle of Armageddon, a name feared by the world’s Ork Hunters. Unlike the massed, roaring assaults typical of his kind, Snikrot’s war is one of ambush and disappearance: his Kommandos travel with little more than blades and nerve, strike Imperial patrols and outposts without warning, and vanish back into the canopy before a response can be organised. Among the Armageddon Steel Legion and the world’s other defenders, he has become a figure told of in accounts passed among the Ork Hunters after dark, less a named enemy than a shape moving in the tree-line.

Snikrot’s known history begins away from Armageddon’s jungle, in the service of Warboss Killzkar as a killer on Dulma’lin. That posting ended when Iron Hand Straken, then a rising officer of the Armageddon forces, threw him from a rooftop during the fighting there; the Imperium recorded Snikrot as killed in the encounter and closed the account. He survived the fall and, over time unaccounted for in any Imperial record, made his way back to Armageddon’s equatorial jungle, where he built the Red Skull Kommandos into the force that bears his mark today. Straken, who rose to renown as one of Armageddon’s most decorated commanders, remains the officer credited with Snikrot’s supposed death, a claim the Ork’s continued activity has never allowed the Imperium to close with confidence.

The Red Skull Kommandos are known by a signature: they take the scalps of those they capture and leave the eyes behind, a mark left deliberately for whoever finds the dead. Snikrot’s hostility to compromise runs deeper than his hostility to Imperial Guardsmen; when daemons entered Armageddon’s war and a faction among the Orks proposed a truce to meet the common threat, Snikrot judged the offer a weakness unworthy of his tribe and moved to remove it from consideration, holding that no accommodation with the enemy — Imperial or otherwise — has a place in his war. That episode, set amid the wider daemonic incursions that have troubled Armageddon alongside its human and Ork combatants, marks one of the clearer instances of Snikrot acting against his own side’s stated interests when he judges them soft.

Ghazghkull Thraka continues to make use of Snikrot for tasks unsuited to open warfare, entrusting him with covert missions beyond the reach of a conventional WAAAGH!. In the course of these, Snikrot has boarded Black Legion Arks and captured a Deathwatch Blackstar gunship, pressing the vessel into service as a mobile camp for his Kommandos — a measure of the reach his small, fast-moving band has come to have against enemies far better supplied than his own tribe. Each operation ends the same way: a return to the equatorial jungle, where the Imperium’s old record of his death has never matched the evidence of his continuing war.